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After weeks of research, reading reviews, and comparison shopping between the Lowrance IWay 500c, the Garmin StreetPilot 2270, and the Tomtom go 700, I finally decided to plunk down $800 for the Tomtom Go 700. Following a week of use including a roundtrip from Sacramento to LA, here are some of my findings.

Pros:

Start-up time is quick. It typically only took 10-15 seconds to start up and an additional 10 seconds to accurately find my position. I imagine the 12 receivers help to find your position fairly accurately and quickly should a couple satellite signals be too weak or not within line of sight of the unit.

The user interface is fantastic. The layout of icons and and GUI is very intuitive. It’s easy to save destinations, POIs, adjust your preferences etc.

The audio cues are great too. Audio output from the speaker is amazingly clear, and the language selections are extremely comprehensive.

The predictive text feature is also very accurate although sometimes you may get two results. For example, if you type in Walnut Street, you might get two options N. Walnut and S. Walnut, traditional maps or even addresses of businesses often times do not make this distinction (which isn’t necessarily their fault) When I looked at the street signs at the intersection, the sign simply said “Walnut Street.”

The 3D map is helpful for gauging future turns and provides a better perspective than your typical 2D or bird’s eye view of the map.

If you are able to pair your cell phone using the integrated Bluetooth feature on the Tomtom go, you’ll find that the hands free audio quality is impressive as well.

Another big benefit is that the Tomtom Go 700 is truly portable. Since there is a battery in the unit you can take it with you on walks while on vacation through San Francisco, NYC, etc. The Garmin StreetPilot 2270 or the Lowrance Iway 500c do not have this feature.

Cons:

I found the maps to be slightly outdated. It’s my understanding that the maps used by Magellan and Garmin are more recent and tend to be more accurate.

The Tomtom 700 does not have WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System), which provides a more accurate position within 3 meters. Sometimes after starting the Tomtom 700 on the freeway,it would tell me that I was on a surface street close-by and parallel to the freeway. The Garmin StreetPilot 2270 does have WAAS.

I live in California and most of our exits are labeled with street names, not exit numbers. Unfortunately this is one of the major flaws with the Tomtom systems as often times they only provide an exit number and not a street name. There were times where it did offer both, but having the street exit names in the map database would be helpful to me.

As with many other GPS navigation systems, the Tomtom’s screen tends to get washed out in direct sunlight. It’s not unreadable, but direct sun will definitely hinder your ability to quicly glance at the display and read any helpful information or prompts.

The POI database is fairly comprehensive but there were exits along my trip to LA that did not list gas stations close by where I could visibly see gas stations present. Also it’s fairly difficult to search for a particular store or restaurant since when you select the POI database it lists POIs in increasing distance based on your present geographic location or city center. Not the easiest way of finding what you want when you know where you want to go.

The assisted satellite navigation (ASN) feature is pretty much useless as on the satellite signal, the GPS system display’s you going in all sorts of directions until you’re out of the tunnel.

Conclusion:

I found the Tomtom 700 to be a competent automobile GPS system, however if you’re considering buying it, I’d select the Tomtom Go 300 instead as the only feature it’s missing is the hard drive and ability to control via the wireless remote which is an option with the 700 model. With the 300 you still get the entire map database of the US compressed into a SD card, where as with the Tomtom 700 it takes a long time to back up the map database to your personal computer and it takes a vast amount of hard drive space (3.5GB). The 300 also has a slightly slower processor but I expect performance to be fairly comprable to the 700 model.

I for one will probably exchange my 700 for a 300 model or wait and hope that Garmin comes out with a battery powered model with an integrated speaker to suceed the Streetpilot 2270 in a few months.

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Tags: ACR, car gps, Garmin, Lowrance, Magellan, mobile gps, Tomtom